Chalk it up to “senioritis” if you like. You remember that condition — your last year of high school, the closer it got to the end, the less everything seemed to matter.

There’s a pretty broad swath of Republicans who have decided that their Congressional careers have just about wrapped up, and I think many of them are undergoing the same process. They have decided that they’re tired of playing the long game of simply pretending like the outrages of the GOP over the last decade are anything but totally abnormal.

Bob Corker and Jeff Flake are essentially saying whatever they want now, and John McCain seems like he’s feeling the end of his career coming on, but the bigger surprises have come from retiring House members on the right — after all, the House is the most conservative of the Republican-controlled arms of the government.

Charlie Dent, from rural Pennsylvania, is one of those House Republicans who, on their way out, is taking the opportunity to name and shame some of the abuses and hypocrisy on the right, and he did just that in an interview with Anderson Cooper, when they discussed whether the outrage from conservatives would be different if it were a Democrat who was embroiled in all of the controversies that Donald Trump finds himself in on a daily basis.

After telling Cooper that he thinks Trump is playing his cards right by saying as little as possible about the Stormy Daniels story, he offered that perhaps it would look a little different if it had been Obama wrapped up in a scandal with a porn star:

It’d be a human rights violation had it been the shoe on the other foot.”

Thanks, Charlie. Now if you could just get a few more colleagues to admit this stuff as well, we might be in a little better shape as a country.

Featured image via Joe Raedle/Getty Images

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Written by Andrew Simpson

Andrew hates long walks on the beach, glitter, and men's rights activists. He can usually be found with his long-suffering wife, who can usually be found asking him to please not order onions on that burger, babe.